Hot Damn Dills & Humble Beginnings: Inside Yee-Haw’s Climb to Retail
From a farmers market table in 2011 to the shelves of major retailers like Whole Foods and Giant, Yee-Haw Pickle Co. has built its brand with grit. Founded by Allison Yeary Cesati and Andrew Cesati in the heart of Colorado, Yee-Haw’s journey is equal parts entrepreneurial persistence and community-rooted charm. We sat down with Drew to talk shop: from early roadblocks to hard-won wins, branding lessons to black lab metaphors, and why doing things the scrappy way still works.
From Farmers Markets to Store Shelves
The Farmers Market is a common and accessible origin point for early founders. Tell us about the early days of Yee-Haw. What did that grind look like, and how did you first break into retail?
We sold our first jar at a local farmers market in August of 2011. Those early days were brutal. We’d be buying the produce from local farms, knocking out the production in a fairly inefficient manner and then heading back out on market tour, on your feet all day actively sampling and selling your products in the hot sun. Exhausting. Our first “wholesale” account was a local store that sold all things spicy. I remember dropping off a handful of cases for the first order and realizing that would have taken all day to sell at a market. Seemed a much better program.
In those years, Whole Foods was hyper focused on supplying local goods. Back then you could walk into your local Whole Foods – show the buyer your items and if they dug them, they could make a request to the regional team to get them set up in the system for DSD ordering. That was our first big play – hustling around our region delivering our 6 items to 4 local Whole Foods. Which was all good and fine. The challenge then became making sure they actually moved off the shelf. Which in all honestly, is still our main focus on the daily.
Navigating the Supply Chain
If you could go back, what would you tell yourself before scaling production and distribution?
Don’t do it? Ha, no not really. I’m not sure we’d do much differently. An early piece of advice we received was there is no one way to build a CPG company. So, we kind of just took our time and figured things out as we went. It was just my wife Allison and I, so we only had one household to cover, and we both worked second jobs as we built it out. That took pressure off the company to be profitable out of the gate. We were able to build it with debt rather than investment, and today we maintain 100% of the company – which also allows us to make calls on the fly. Sometimes we feel like we’re making it up as we go along but it’s worked OK thus far so we’ll probably just keep rolling with that program.
Ultimately it’s about persistence. At some point we were so far into this thing that the only way out was through. It still feels like that most days.
Tell us about the journey building your supply chain network. What makes a strong supply chain or retail partner in your experience?
Some are more so than others. There’s also a lot of movement among category managers so some relationships last longer than others. Ultimately we’re a little old school – we’re relationship people and believe that people sell products to people. We’re not afraid to pick up the phone or write a dozen emails. At the same time, we understand buyers are under a lot of pressure and are getting hit up by 1000 brands just like us. So, it all needs to be approached with an air of patience. Kind of like our black lab Freya – patience and persistence.
Some of the better partners are those who are actually into selling groceries. There are a lot of ways retailers and distributors manifest revenue. Sometimes on the buy, sometimes via fees and billbacks, and sometimes through marketing initiatives that cost a lot and have mixed ROI. But the ones we like best are ones that focus on moving product. Margins are reasonable, they pass deals along at 100% or close to it, and generally are in it to put food in baskets. That’s when we do best – when people buy pickles.
Ultimately our best partner is for sure our manufacturing partner. We kind of joined forces at a similar stage in our growth and have grown together. They are open to every idea we bring to them, care very much, have an awesome team, and take all our concerns to heart. Allison and I were fortunate enough to have managed a smaller scale factory on our own for years so we we’re not coming into this blind, so we’ve been able to forge a strong co-dependent relationship built on trust and good communication.
Product Development: Understanding What Works
You’ve kept your product line pretty tight over the years. What’s guided your approach to developing or not developing new SKUs?
We haven’t added many SKUs over time. We had a couple short stints with whole pickles that were delicious, but sourcing became problem. Which is why most whole pickles in the market are made in India. We recently updated a couple recipes which we’re really excited about – Wild Dill Stackers to name one – but for the most part we have our core group of items from the farmer’s market days that we know are excellent. We know they sell well, and we know how to promote them. So for now, it’s just more of the same and getting these most excellent products in more hands and bellies of the American consumer.
Our products are clean label, low sodium, non-GMO. They are good, they are good for you, and they are better than all the pickles out there. So, it’s a product we can feel great about selling to more retailers and people.
That being said we are working on two new items in a category adjacent to shelf stable pickles. We are very excited about them – more to come later this year.
Branding That Grows With You
Your brand has evolved strongly since your early days. How have you kept it authentic through each stage of growth?
Oh man, Allison could talk for days on this one! We have some fun shots on our website from our first meeting at a local coffee shop. Some of our original branding and ideas, scribbled on a napkin. Some of those concepts still carry through today. For our first label design, Allison taught herself how to use Illustrator. They were printed on paper labels and applied by hand to our jars. The branding was fun but the labels couldn’t last a night in the fridge. We eventually found a professional designer for our first full design. We were so pumped on the look – got everything worked up and launched at Whole Foods regionally only to realize they didn’t look all that great on the shelf. We used this really expensive estate paper typical for the wine industry so they looked and felt great in your hand, but when you put them on the shelf they magically disappeared. Total drag…
On the next round we found a firm that took us on and helped us really build out a brand top to bottom. They have been an excellent resource for us over the years, and we still use them for all our major projects. Our most recent project was reworking our identity and our actual logo. Our previous logo was great but got lost on the jar – no one knew who Yee-haw Pickle Co. was – we were Hot Damn Dills or Giddy Up Garlic Dills – so we decided to rework our logo and the label design. Our latest logo is still hand drawn and is real, real nice – also makes for the best schwag a company would ask for.
Community and Staying Power
How has community shaped your journey so far?
The natural foods community is a solid bunch. There’s a great group of entrepreneurs and founders always ready to lend some advice. Most of us in it for this long have a good list of what not to do, and typically folks are more then willing to share in that. Most brokers are a good resource as well. They are a tireless bunch and typically have a good bead on how best to execute within a given region. They have been a solid resource over time. We have one brokerage we’ve worked with since 2012, and some of the concepts we learned from them we still execute on every day.
How has your role changed as the company has grown?
It’s grown in the sense that there’s just more of it. A lot of the things we do every day we’ve been doing since day 1. We used to count by jars, then we started counting by cases, then layers, then pallets and now on the good days we count by partial and full truckloads. Much of the work is fairly similar to early wholesale days, only the numbers just get a little bigger and I’d like to think we’ve gotten a little better at it.
I would say a tipping point for us was gaining access to data. Understanding where the category is, how your items are indexing vs the sub-cat and what to do with that information. That’s probably been one of the main things that has helped us grow. That and making sweet PowerPoint decks…
Any small brands or founders you’re rooting for right now?
Our local homegrown reusable, vegan wrap company – Happy Wraps. Great, unique product. She’s an artist and is working on creating her own fabric designs for the wraps. Her stuff is great!
Also, always rooting for our farmers. We’ve been working with the same growers for over 13 years. They never shrugged when we were buying 8 bushels at a time for a day’s run to last us a couple weeks till now - when we’re moving loads. It’s the single most important thing that goes into this whole scene – the cucumber.
Parting Wisdom
Any wins or losses along the way you want to share?
Four SKUs at Giant via Founders! National with Kroger roll out this month. Two new SKUs at Publix beginning late summer for a total of five. Looking for additional placements at Walmart after unit turns have increased 150% in the past 365 days. It’s been a good year.
What’s your best piece of advice for fellow founders?
Probably that which was given to us:
There is no one way to start and build a CPG company.
I’d also like to debunk some of the chatter coming from LinkedInfluencers pontificating on seed money. You don’t need a couple Mil to start a CPG company. You need an excellent and consistent product, decent branding, packaging that works, respectable margins, a competitive price point, and a willingness to roll your sleeves up and do the dirty work. That is what will make your brand successful.